Songs for the Mute
by Scarlett4
Summary: A parallel to OotP from a Death Eater's PoV. Cordelia Rosier, half-blood niece of Evan Rosier, has to make a choice and walk the road to Damascus. A story prominently featuring Death Eaters Lucius Malfoy, Peter Pettigrew, Julian Avery and Rabastan Lestran


**A/N: **Great thanks go to Roxana, who was the first person ever to see this, Dreamfeather, who helped when I was about to give up, thecurmudgeons, who was there to hold my hand when it mattered and who saved all the little bits that needed saving, and Risti, who saved Elizabeth.  
**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.   
  
  
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**Collection of Songs **

**Part 1: Songs for the Mute**

            We are taught to cast the Unforgivables, cast them mercilessly and do this with our eyes, ears and nostrils wide open. See, hear, smell. Tears, cries, blood. It's never our mouths that are open. Our lips are sealed, never to utter an echo of the screams we provoke. We, the Death Eaters, sing a Collection of Songs composed especially for us. Songs for the Mute.

Prologue: Raise Your Glasses To The Muggle 

William Ashworth was many things. He was tall and slim, rich and fond of his job, naïve and shallow, stubborn and in love. And he knew all this. But William Ashworth was also something else, something that he did not know, but which was more important at that time, on the threshold of the years 1979 and 1980, than any of his known traits. He was a Muggle.  

----~~~****~~~----  


  
      People said Elizabeth Rosier could never have been described as beautiful. It was not true, but because of people's tendency to banish everything that tarries on the edge between the generally accepted and the out of the ordinary, her cut-glass appearance tended to be dismissed as easily as the rest of her. However, this was not because descriptions of her character were limited to frustratingly few words. On the contrary, Elizabeth Rosier was a befuddling melange of qualities. 

How she had come to be a breathing dichotomy was a different matter altogether, one that had deep, time-crusted roots in her childhood and early adolescence, as does most everything that is inseparable from our morality and character. As a little girl, she had taught herself meekness to escape the harassment of her parents' remarks. Later on, she had scratched out the concept of degrading, corrupting humbleness to replace it with unrelenting pride. While Elizabeth had not been allowed to speak her mind, her train of thought had travelled undisturbed through a scenery so outlandish, even wizards would have found it unsettling. Still, she was a gifted learner, and what she had lost in years of silence, she had made up for later, in years of gravitating towards the tightly knit group of her brother's friends and towards Lucius Malfoy. Her years of school had proven a perpetual challenge to be quicker of word than her brother, quicker of thought than Severus Snape and an equal to Lucius Malfoy. The last, she had not accomplished, partly since Lucius had left school in her third year. 

Because of this, perhaps, Elizabeth Rosier was an unfinished human being in a sense. Had she maintained her family principles or adopted Lucius's, she could have been spectacularly bad. Stranded somewhere in the middle, she had had neither the time, nor the support to become spectacularly good. Elizabeth, much as there were few pure Rosier qualities left in her, had never been cowardly enough to allow herself to be lukewarm. Thus, she was undecided yet strong-willed, modest but arrogant, and kind while unforgiving. 

Still, Rosiers were not allowed to be paradoxes. They were pure-blooded, rich, noble, graceful and merciless, but never paradoxes. They could be anything they wanted, as long as it didn't involve any kind of internal conflict. Conflicts of emotional nature were placed as high as second place in the family hierarchy of inconceivable deeds, right after betrayal. Sometimes, they even overlapped. This was because the Rosiers had learned, during the more than one thousand years they had been established as a well-respected wizarding family, that nothing good could come out of contradictions. 

However, as Elizabeth Rosier had not aligned herself with family standards all her life, she allowed herself moments of introspection and even of turmoil. So, if Elizabeth Rosier was anything at all, she was confused. That didn't keep her from being determined to settle things once and for all. And the only way to do this was to talk to her brother, Evan.

----~~~****~~~----

   She had been standing on the third step of the stairs, leaning on the railing nonchalantly for almost five minutes, when the heavy door creaked open. A dark-clad figure slunk in and rushed towards the corridor on the right side of the entrance. Suddenly, it stopped, and in a flash of movement turned around, took out a wand, and pointed it straight at her.

'Would you please stop doing this, Liz?'

Evander Rosier looked at his sister in obvious annoyance. His black robes contrasted violently with a face so white, one could have thought his head had been stolen off a marble statue of a Roman patrician. Moreover, Evan greatly resembled such a sculpture – beautiful in an indifferent way, imposing in a chilling way and lacking feeling in a studied way. Even as he spoke, he seemed the creation of an unknown Pygmalion come alive, voice as cold and sharp as the edge of cutting diamonds. 

'You've been doing this since you were what, three? It's gotten old by now, honestly. And I'd rather go to my room and get cleaned up, so if you would excuse me…'

He made as if to leave. 

'I wouldn't say it's old,' Elizabeth remarked, lifting her hand to play idly with what looked like an ivory casket hanging on a chain at her neck. 'Just behold the success I still have in making you throw a fit. It's been more than fifteen years and you still hate that I know almost exactly when you'll be home.'

'Do you always have to keep an eye on me?' Evan asked, and his frown dissipated even before it had the chance of reaching his eyes. 

'It's what little sisters do.'

Evan smiled a bit at this, only the corners of his mouth turning up in a gesture that seemed to not have been exercised for some time. He crossed the hall in a few long strides, reaching the bottom of the stairs.

'I want to talk to you,' Elizabeth said, her voice colourless. 

'Fine,' Evan replied, trying to seat himself on the stair. She noticed he bit his lip slightly as his back bent.

'We should go to my room,' she suggested. 'We wouldn't want _some people_ ratting on us,' she continued, turning a meaningful glance to the portrait of her Great-great Uncle Francis, perhaps the last Rosier to show off his Norman ancestry with his large frame, faked accent and incessant eavesdropping. He sniffed in disdain at his grand-grand niece and complained loudly.

'I cannot underrrstand you, girrrl. As forrr you, boy,' he gestured at Evan, 'I see zat you alrrready arrre a good Rosier,' he finished, making the 'r' at the end of Rosier a mute letter.

'Come,' Elizabeth motioned to Evan, and purposefully paid little attention to the darkness that had slowly made way into his deep green eyes following their Great-great Uncle's remark. She started going up the stairs, and pretended not to hear her brother scornfully whispering to the portrait.

'I see no reason for pride in that, Uncle.'

----~~~****~~~----

 Elizabeth's room was on the second floor of Rosier Manor, down one of the draughty corridors, on the northern side of the house. She had covered the stony walls of the mansion in white tapestry, with intricate patterns that stood out in relief, and she refused to draw the curtains, which were a matching shade of champagne, the same as the soft, thick rug. Elizabeth had insisted on buying the furniture from Russia, where the last of the tsars' belongings were auctioned off on the wizarding black market. It was all in shades ranging from white to champagne, in very simple, yet elegant design. Elizabeth laughed mirthfully every time she visited the Hermitage, remembering that she could easily turn the alleged originals into what they truly were with one flick of a wand. She had toyed with the idea for some time, gauging the reaction of Muggles at the sight of bourgeois chairs and tables instead of the luxurious, if not entirely tasteful, furniture exhibited.

Her father, Melvyn Rosier, had actually just that once appreciated his daughter's taste, even though he openly expressed his disapproval towards this ridiculous obsession with white. To which Elizabeth's response, which no one would have expected and which earned her the worst punishment of all her sixteen years, had been: 'How can I not like white when I've been surrounded by black for all my life? I've had a black childhood, I have black parents, I've had a black house for as long as I can remember and I'm expected to lead a black life. Can't I have white in my room at least?' 

She remembered her father's punishment better than anything. He had asked her to kindly accompany him to his study, where he sat down in an armchair and contemplated the girl in front of him for a minute. What he saw must have not pleased him, because he scowled deeply and asked her to take a seat on the rug.

Elizabeth complied and waited. Her father took out his wand, and lit all the lights in the room with a flick (_'Lux fulgoris!'_). It was blinding, and she almost would have covered her eyes if she hadn't caught onto his symbolism. 

'Do you like the light, my dearest?' he asked, and his voice would have seemed almost kind to anyone who wasn't Elizabeth.

'I like brightness.' If only her voice hadn't quivered, if only…

'Do you really? Then don't blink, darling. Don't blink. Enjoy your light. _Oculi aperire!_' 

Elizabeth tried to blink, but found that she couldn't. A few moments passed in silence, and then the pain in her lids became almost unbearable. Too late, she thought of covering her face with her hands, but her father was faster, yet again (_Petrificus manos!_). The light was harming her eyes, there was a strain in the muscles twining all around her eye sockets, and she could feel tears starting to flow freely in an attempt to block out the brightness. As always, her father remained still. 

'Please,' she gasped out, when it had become excruciating. 

'How is darkness now? No longer a dreaded prospect, is it? Is it?' 

'No, it's not,' Elizabeth admitted, and had her eyes not been so full of tears and out of focus, Melvyn Rosier would have dreaded what he saw there. He had broken her, turned her towards the path of his choice, but she would heal.

'_Finite incantatum_. You may have your furniture.' 

It had taken her another three years, but she had healed.

----~~~****~~~----

 'What did you want to talk to me about?' Evan asked, comfortably seating himself on a sofa, the pain in his back momentarily forgotten.

'It's… Evan, I have a decision to make,' Elizabeth said, pacing the room. 'I'm 18 already, and I realised I've been living a lie.'

'Haven't we all? Look, it's the age of lies right now – they're all the rage. Spiffy, incredible, bloody extraordinary, they are. I should know. I'm in the business.'

'Look, Evan. This is not a joke,' Elizabeth chided. 

'Never said it was. It's just this two-way supermarket. "At Liar's", they call it.' Evan shifted his hands in front of his eyes in an all-encompassing gesture to suggest the size of the shop. 'Little white lies, ten a penny. Join the Dark Lord, you get a discount. Even better, if you're a Slytherin, you get them free of charge. Everyone just seems to throw them at you. Because you're somehow expected to have piles of them at home, in the wardrobe.'

Elizabeth's smile faltered. 

'Looks like I got a big one myself,' she said. 'I guess Mother and Father thought it was in good taste to buy one at my birth.'

'Oh, don't worry, we got the same treatment. No need to accuse them of favouritism, is there?'

On Evan's face, bitterness flowed into regret. Then, it mixed with that unique Rosier loyalty to decisions already made and to values and beliefs, which would remain unseen to many, steeling itself into a mask. Perhaps it was not the most comfortable mask, and Evan was not sure he looked good in it. Nevertheless, once put on, he did not see reason to remove it. He believed in it. 

_'We could have been Hufflepuffs, all of us,' _Elizabeth thought. _'This house reeks of loyalty. Misunderstood, but loyalty, all the same.'_

'However,' Evan continued, 'I was under the impression that this was more about you and less about our darling parents, God rest their souls if He can find such a thing.'

Elizabeth flinched. She did not know exactly why, because she had never truly mourned her parents. They had been there, space-fillers wielding wands when she was a child, towering shadows cast upon her while she grew up and empty spaces she did not care to fill, now, that she was reaching adulthood. 

'No need to start, Liz,' Evan said suddenly and she tried to remember whether he had ever looked like that before, eyes blazing with the memory of something foreign to her. 'I'm not going to burn in Hell for speaking ill of the dead. There's a long list of sins before that.'

'Don't…'

'Don't what?' Evan nervously stood up to look his sister in the eyes. 'Don't kill? Don't lie? Sorry, sis, been there, done _that_. Don't join Dark Lords? It's in the family. And I'm sorry if I should regret it and repent, because I don't. It was all my doing. I made a decision, carried it out and _I_ go with it…'

'So did I,' she interrupted, 'I have made a decision of my own. I have been thinking of joining the Dark Lord for a long time,' there was a fierceness in her features that made her look for a minute more like a Rosier than she ever had, 'and I will.'

Evan laughed. He broke down and laughed, and when he finally stifled it, he could barely gasp out a few words.

'You… Liz, this is a joke. It must be. Little Liz, with her lovely white boudoir that she fought so hard to have… Little Liz, who dabbled in the Dark Arts just because she had a crush on Lucius Malfoy…'

'Little Liz, who became better in the Dark Arts than Lucius Malfoy and thoroughly enjoyed it.'

Evan looked as if he was crumbling under his own weight. His handsome features darkened, and he slowly shook his head in disbelief. Someone could even have interpreted it as disappointment. 'You fancy yourself different. You're just like the rest of us, with one single thing to make you special. You're so… grey. You can't be just black, or just white, because you were brought up to be black and you long for the white, and thus you are… a paradox.'  

'I hate that word, and you know it.'

'You hate it because it defines you. Just as you hated black that night. Just as you'll hate our Dark Lord for everything he does, and love him because he'll be the embodiment of your choice, and you'll hate me for bringing you into this, and you'll love me for the same thing. You just can't help it. Liz, why would you want to join the Dark Lord?' he asked unexpectedly.

'Why did you?' Elizabeth countered.

She had never dared pose this particular question before, and it had not been lack of curiosity that had stopped her. At some point in time between her fascination with Lucius Malfoy and her duel with Julian Avery, Evan had become less of a brother and more of an unfathomable entity that she shared a house with.

'Magical contract,' he explained, 'Severus, Austin, Rabastan, Rory, Julian, Bellatrix and I… we had a spot of trouble with Broderick Bode at one time. Department of Mysteries issues. He was determined to report us to Bartemius Crouch, and you know how Crouch is. Would have landed us in Azkaban without a trial. Augustus Rookwood bailed us out of it. Lucius was into it, as well. And then, well, it became… serious. It still is. So what's your reason?'

She pondered his question for a minute. The answer was very clear in her mind. It was the speaking it that scared the life out of her.

'I want protection,' she blurted out.

'I can do that, Liz,' Evan said, and closed his arms around her in a brotherly hug that they hadn't shared for so long. Elizabeth clung on for dear life.

'No, no you can't,' she said. 'Not from this.'

'I can do anything with the right amount of time and the right spells,' he answered confidently, and for a minute she thought they were back to being small children, fighting about what they were going to become. Evan had said that there was nothing he couldn't do.

'Can you keep a half-blooded infant from being called a cross-breed, a mongrel, if… _when this war is won by your side?'_

'Why would I even want to? What does this have to do with joining the Dark Lord?'

Elizabeth broke their hug. 'You would want to because you'll be the uncle of that infant in less than 7 months,' she said.

Evan glanced down at her, barely moving, the only sign that he was alive being his ragged intake of air. He swallowed with difficulty, and Elizabeth hoped he had swallowed the biting remarks she was expecting, as well. 

'You just bloody had to, didn't you?' Evan snarled, rubbing at his temples. 'Look, Liz,' he lectured, and put a hand under her chin to force her to look at him, 'we're fighting a blundering war here. And you had to rebel; you had the dim idea to start sprouting half-bloods in the middle of it. Top it all with joining the Dark Lord – he'll read right through you, I know he will – and you're _dead_.'

 Elizabeth cast a fleeting look upon her brother. Evan was nervous, but underneath his irritation there was concern, real worry that she felt she could touch and cling onto. 

'Who is the father?' he demanded.

'A Muggle.'

'I had figured that much.'

'William Ashworth.'

This, she had feared. Her brother's features shifted, green eyes like pits of coiling and uncoiling serpents, lips pressed together so hard they were turning the colour of milk laced with rasperry syrup, nostrils flaring up and a vein throbbing nervously. Then, much to her surprise, he calmed down, and when he spoke, it was not in anger but in concern.

'He'll never understand us, Liz.'

'I know,' she said quietly. And then, 'I love him', as if this could stand as a wall between what William could not fathom and their child.

Exhaling loudly, Evan shook his head.

'Fine. Look what we'll do. You can go have your baby at a little Muggle hospital. Then, I'll convince someone, I don't know, Severus or Austin or even Lucius, to be her godfather. The Dark Lord will not be able to break what he himself has bound. Besides, the war will be over soon. He probably won't care. I'll just pull you and my little niece through it.'

Elizabeth laughed heartily at this. 'You have no way to know that it's going to be a girl.'

'You're right, I don't. But an uncle can always hope, can't he?' Evan said, reached towards a decanter filled with brandy, and stopped in mid-movement. 'You're not allowed any of this, are you?' 

She shook her head. Evan filled two glasses with clear water instead, and handed one to his sister. 

'Let's raise our glasses to the Muggle!' he said, and drank it to the bottom. 'In hopes that he will see.'

Had William Ashworth been in his beloved's white boudoir at that time, he would have seen nothing out of the ordinary. Elizabeth Rosier's brother had just drunk to his health after finding out that he was going to be an uncle. But then again, William Ashworth _was_ a _Muggle_.

----~~~****~~~----

'I don't understand Lily, I swear to Merlin that I don't.'

'Oh, calm down, Prongs, old boy. It'll be all right.'

'I can't very well calm down when my wife, yes, _my_ wife, decides she is having a baby, who just happens to also be _my_ baby, in a Muggle hospital. Here, I can't even perform a simple _Lumos_ without being busted or having to cast dozens of Memory Charms, which just isn't an option, can I now?'

James Potter fumed. He fumed at his wife, for insisting that she would have this baby in a Muggle hospital, he fumed at Sirius Black for telling him to calm down every twenty seconds, he fumed at Remus Lupin, who was quietly explaining that Lily was right and that giving birth here was completely safe, he fumed at Peter Pettigrew for not being there and he fumed at…

'Evan Rosier?'

… for being there.

Evan slowly turned his head and his eyes passed over the door in front of him. He gritted his teeth at the sight of Potter, Black and Lupin. It seemed as if his plans were crumbling in front of him. Dumbledore's spies were there, and the next minute he knew the whole world would be finding out that his sister had given birth to a child of mixed parentage. Then, in order, would follow: Dumbledore's attempt to attract Liz to his side, her fierce opposition, the Dark Lord finding out and solving this problem with three _Avada Kedavra_s and a _Crucio_. That was, if he was lucky. Otherwise, it would be four _Avada Kedavra_s. And the worst of all was that William Ashworth was sitting next to him, and he could see out of the corner of his eye that he was increasingly curious.

'What are you doing here, Rosier?' Sirius Black spat, as if even speaking to Evan would dirty him.

'I may ask the same thing, Black.' Evan stood up and straightened his back.

'You won't get an answer. While my asking what _you_ are doing here obviously is useless. Tell me, how does Voldemort intend to rule the world when he can't for the life of him comprehend the art of… subtlety? You know, as in "Do not send your Death Eaters to spy on your enemy without having them wear at least a mask."'

And exactly at this moment in time, five things happened almost at once. A clock struck midnight in the church near the hospital. William Ashworth asked 'Who are these people, who is Voldemort and who are the Death Eaters?'. A nurse came out of room twenty seven  saying: 'Mister Ashworth, you may now come in to see your daughter. Mister Rosier, your niece is all bathed and ready to meet her uncle.' Peter Pettigrew stumbled through one of the doors at the end of the hallway, face as white as the cast on his hand, and a voice which James Potter recognised immediately could be heard in what must have been a shout muffled by the door 'James! I'm… having… the… baby.'

Glances were exchanged, both parts silently sworn to secrecy. Years later, they would both blame the betrayal on each other, even though they feared the same wizard. None of them would ever guess that from that night on they were all bound to an absence looming high over their heads. 

And, in a way, not only William Ashworth was a Muggle that night.

  



End file.
